nagement would necessarily result in
reckless waste and dishonesty, and tend to land many of the bank's
officers in Canada, and not a few of its depositors or investors in the
poor-house. Such would be your judgment, and in pronouncing it you
would at the same time pronounce judgment upon the manner in which the
business part of our national Government, as well as of many if not most
of our State and municipal governments, has been conducted for several
generations. This is the spoils system. And I have by no means presented
an exaggerated or even a complete picture of it; nay, rather a mild
sketch, indicating only with faint touches the demoralizing influences
exercised by that system with such baneful effect upon the whole
political life of the nation.

Looking at the financial side of the matter alone--it is certainly bad
enough; it is indeed almost incomprehensible how the spoils system could
be permitted through scores of years to vitiate our business methods
in the conduct of the national revenue service, the postal service, the
Indian service, the public-land service, involving us in indescribable
administrative blunders, bringing about Indian wars, causing immense
losses in the revenue, breeding extravagant and plundering practices
in all Departments, costing our people in the course of time untold
hundreds of millions of money, and making our Government one of the
most wasteful in the world. All this, I say, is bad enough. It might be
called discreditable enough to move any self-respecting people to shame.
But the spoils system has inflicted upon the American people injuries
far greater than these.

The spoils system, that practice which turns public offices, high
and low, from public trusts into objects of prey and booty for the
victorious party, may without extravagance of language be called one of
the greatest criminals in our history, if not the greatest. In the whole
catalogue of our ills there is none more dangerous to the vitality of
our free institutions.

It tends to divert our whole political life from its true aims. It
teaches men to seek something else in politics than the public good.

It puts mercenary selfishness as the motive power for political action
in the place of public spirit, and organizes that selfishness into a
dominant political force.

It attracts to active party politics the worst elements of our
population, and with them crowds out the best. It transforms political
parties fro